Haight, a retired businessman and former mayor of Palo Alto, can be excused for not knowing the current format of KOIT radio, whose listeners are more likely to hear Bonnie Raitt singing the blues than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing about Jesus.

KOIT (Lite Rock/Less Talk) is owned by Bonneville International Corp., which is owned by the Mormon Church.

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"We have 15 radio stations all across the country, in most of the large markets," said Haight, a member of Bonneville's board of directors and of the company's executive committee. "We run them like businesses."

And then there are the more apparent, nonprofit assets of the Mormon church, including 81 Mormon temples, thousands of meeting halls and other church buildings, thrift shops, grain silos, Brigham Young University and the Salt Lake Macaroni and Noodle Co.

Mormon church leaders stopped releasing financial information in 1959, so the total value of the church's assets is a mystery to anyone outside the inner circle of Mormon power in Salt Lake City. Mormonism demands much of its 9.4 million members -- 10 percent of their income, countless hours of volunteer work and unquestioning obedience to church leaders who say they speak for God.

Church leaders are tight-lipped about where the money goes, saying only that their members' tithes and their corporate profits are used to spread Mormonism around the world, to respond to humanitarian needs and to take care of their own during hard times.

Through its nonprofit Deseret Industries, the church runs a huge internal welfare system that grows and processes its own food, distributes it on its own trucks and provides it at no charge to needy members through its own network of church storehouses.

At Bishop's Storehouses across the country, needy church members can pick up anything from diapers to detergent -- most of it manufactured by the Latter-day Saints.

But church members pay for the privilege when times are good. All Mormons, throughout the world, are expected to send 10 percent of their gross income to Salt Lake City, and church sources estimate that 30 to 40 percent of its 9.4 million members actually give that much -- or more.

How much tithing revenue flows into Salt Lake is a closely guarded secret, but it has been estimated that several billion dollars come in annually.

Much of the money comes from U.S. members. And in recent years, it has helped bankroll the worldwide expansion of Mormonism in Latin America, Africa and the former Soviet Union.

"In the United States and Canada, we're better than self-sufficient, so we can help support those weaker countries in other parts of the world," Haight said.

Many Mormon businesses date back to the church's pioneer era in Utah, when the Mormon economy was the economy.

Other holdings, such as its secular radio network, are maintained both to provide income and as a possible future vehicle for church pronouncements.

"It would be available if someday the president of the church would want to speak to the people," Haight said. "We have a satellite system across America and Canada."

Elbert Peck, the editor and publisher of Sunstone, an independent Mormon magazine, said Haight once told a local Mormon gathering that the church "socks away 20 percent of its money every day in a rainy-day fund."

"That's a lot of money," Peck said. "The church goal is to never again be beholden to the government or outside corporations. There were days in the past when banks in New York practically owned the church.

"They have a huge problem now with where to put all the money. They put a lot of it in real estate, because they don't need it immediately."

Some church critics, such as Salt Lake lawyer Paul Toscano, say the church has lost touch with its radical communitarian roots and has taken on a leadership style more suited to multinational corporations than a Christian church.

"It's highly patriarchal and built on the corporate system of promotions. It's all about prestige and power," said Toscano, who was excommunicated by the church in 1993 for his outspoken views.

"It's too authoritarian, too non-disclosing and too controlling," he said in an interview. "The leadership has turned into an elite group. They have a divine-right-of-kings attitude. They believe that whatever comes into their heads is what God would want."